This is the first chapter of the Caboto Chronicles—a five-part journey along Canada’s Atlantic coast. Next stop: the Gaspé Peninsula.
There is a particular hunger that takes hold of us when we travel. Not the hunger for photographs, or for another city checked off a list. The hunger to find something we cannot quite name — proof, perhaps, that other people have also lived inside the questions we carry. That history is not only what the plaques say. That we are allowed to look underneath.
It was the autumn of 2021. The world had not yet exhaled from two years of pandemic stillness, and my partner Rocco and I were ready — not just for movement, but for meaning. We pointed the car east from Toronto, following the ghost of Giovanni Caboto, the Venetian explorer who sailed under an English king and arrived, according to history, somewhere on the Canadian shore in 1497. The Caboto Chronicles, we called it: a road trip along the Atlantic coast in search of the traces a man leaves when he names something that was already named.
Quebec City was the first chapter. We did not expect it to be the one that changed the premise of the whole journey.
What Niva Knew
In every travel story, someone tells you to begin with the Château Frontenac. Its copper-green towers, its Gothic Revival silhouette, and its absolute refusal to be subtle against the sky above the St. Lawrence. And yes—we saw it. We photographed it. It is magnificent.
But we began, by chance and by grace, somewhere more honest.
Our first morning, wandering the narrow streets of the lower town before the tourist buses arrived, we found Sagamité—a restaurant owned by a First Nations family, tucked into the old stone of the city like a small, stubborn truth. Daniel Perrier met us at the door. Unhurriedly, with evident pride, he told us the story of the family behind the restaurant—and of this land before any European gave it a name. Daniel told us what we should eat. We ate. We listened.
It is a strange and clarifying thing—to begin your exploration of a colonial city at the table of the people who were here before the colony. Before Champlain raised his walls. Before Cabot sailed toward a horizon someone else already knew. Before the city acquired its UNESCO designation and its horse-drawn carriages and its reputation for European charm.
Every city has a story it is proud to tell. And then there is the story underneath that one. The Sagamité family lives in that second story—not as a footnote. As the original text.
To eat at Niva’s table is a small act with a large resonance. It does not complete the work of reconciliation — nothing as simple as breakfast could. But it is a choice about where you direct your attention, and your dollars, and your hunger. In a city that has spent four centuries insisting on its own survival, it matters where you begin.
The City That Refused to Disappear
Quebec City is, by any measure, an act of cultural resistance. Surrounded by the vast English-speaking continent, it has insisted—for four centuries—on being French. On speaking French. On eating French. On dreaming, arguing, and falling in love in French.
This is not nostalgia. It is survival through insistence.
And yet—survival through insistence is a phrase that belongs, with a far older and more urgent claim, to the people who were here before the colony. Before the French. Before the English. Before any European planted a flag in soil that already had a name. Quebec’s right to resist erasure is real. So is the erasure it has yet to fully reckon with. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission delivered its 94 Calls to Action in 2015. A decade later, the majority remain unimplemented. The city that refuses to disappear exists inside a country still deciding whether to remember what it buried.
The Pilgrim and Her Ghost
And yet. Caboto. Our ghostly travelling companion.
Giovanni Caboto — a Venetian sailing for an English king, “discovering” a continent that did not need discovering — is a figure of magnificent contradiction. He is also, I have come to think, a figure who reveals something true about why we travel. We all go looking for something. We all plant flags, metaphorically, on shores that were already inhabited. The question is what we do when we realize it.
We were following his route. But Sagamité had already asked us to reconsider the premise of the whole journey. You do not discover what is already known. You can only arrive, pay attention, and have the humility to be changed.
That, I think, is what the best travel is. Not conquest. Not documentation. Arrival.
The Palimpsest
A palimpsest — a manuscript where earlier writing has been scraped away and written over, but not entirely erased — is the most accurate metaphor I have for Quebec City.
Rue du Trésor, that narrow alley of outdoor art wedged between stone walls, where painters hang their canvases and strangers slow down involuntarily. The building at 10-12-14 Rue Hébert, designed by Charles Baillairgé in 1856 — its brick and stone decorated with the ornamental confidence of a man who believed his city was permanent. The knowledge that at number 5 on the same street, from 1821 to 1828, lived James MacPherson Le Moine, who wrote about the landscape as though it were a living thing—because it was.
Whose names survive on streets and stones? Who gets to outlast themselves in a city’s memory? Le Moine. Baillairgé. Champlain. Cabot.
Not Niva. Not the thousands of people whose names the land itself remembers, even when the city’s plaques do not.
I walked those streets aware of this. Aware that beauty and injustice can occupy the same cobblestone. That being moved by a place does not require being blind to what it has erased.
The Body Has Its Own Itinerary
We reached the Terrasse Dufferin in the afternoon—that magnificent wooden boardwalk stretched along the clifftop above the St. Lawrence, the Château Frontenac looming behind and the river spreading out ahead like a sentence with no intention of ending.
My knee had begun to protest. Not dramatically—just with the steady, insistent language a body uses when it has decided you need to stop moving and simply look.
So we sat. And I found myself staring at the contrast I couldn’t stop thinking about: the castle, massive and static, anchored to its stone promontory as though permanence were a virtue—and the river, indifferent to all of it, carrying everything downstream without sentiment or apology. The castle claims history. The river simply continues.
Then came the stairs back up to the upper town. There are many of them. They are steep. My knee had opinions.
I climbed one step at a time, with all the grace of someone sincerely trying not to fall. At some point I had to laugh at myself — at the gap between the traveller I imagine myself to be and the woman currently clutching a handrail in Old Quebec. Rocco filmed the whole thing. He will not be receiving a medal for tenderness.
This too is travel. The body arriving somewhere the itinerary did not plan for.
The People Were the Destination
The real reason for our stop in Quebec City—the reason that had been quietly organising the whole day—was an evening with my dear friend Kawther and her family.
We had not seen each other since before the pandemic. Two years of video calls and messages, and the particular loneliness of missing someone who is close enough to imagine and too far away to touch. And then: her door, her kitchen, pizza on the table, her children’s voices filling a room.
There is no historic site in Quebec City more moving than that evening.
Afterward, we walked along Avenue Cartier under the decorative lamps strung between the buildings overhead—light suspended in the dark, the street briefly transformed into something between a city and a dream. Kawther and I walked arm in arm, the way women do when they have missed each other and are not quite ready to stop being in the same place.
The Château Frontenac was elsewhere. The river was elsewhere. The ghost of Cabot was back somewhere on the cobblestones.
We were here. Present. Exactly where we needed to be.
What the River Remembers
Quebec City gave us more than history. It gave us a question to carry through the rest of the Caboto Chronicles.
What are you actually looking for when you travel? The famous façade, or the story underneath it? The explorer’s route, or the wisdom of the people who were already there? The landmark, or the friend you haven’t held in two years?
The St. Lawrence has been answering this question far longer than any of us have been asking it. It flows past the colonial walls and the First Nations restaurant and the cobblestone streets and the names on the stones and the steep stairs and the benches where women walk arm in arm in the autumn dark.
It doesn’t choose. It carries everything.
That is the invitation — not to choose between the grandeur and the grief, between the beauty and the wound, between the city on the plaque and the city underneath it. But to travel with all of it in your arms. To arrive. To pay attention. To let yourself be changed.
You are not just a tourist passing through. You are a witness. And what you witness here — what gets under your skin and refuses to leave — that is the beginning of something.
Have you ever travelled in search of a history that doesn’t quite add up—your own, or someone else’s? I’d love to know where that journey took you.
